Screaming Cupid

It is, in my humble opinion, a better name for a band than it is as a work of art by Hendrick de Keyser I, 1615, recently purchased by the Rijksmuseum.

image from Art Daily

I'd never heard of Hendrick.  I learned quite a bit about him--primarily known as an architect, he was also renowned as a portrait sculptor.  If you're interested, you can find some examples and an entry here at the Rijksmuseum.

I love the story--that Cupid, nosing around for honey is stung by a bee and sets up howling.  Venus comforts him but also reminds him that if a tiny bee causes so much pain for the sweetness of honey, how much more pain is caused by Cupid's arrow for the sweetness of love.

The art doesn't really work for me: these extreme emotional images were very popular in the 17th c.  Rembrandt, slightly later, makes etchings of his own face in exaggerated expressions.  I do like the mouth with its toothless gums and the chin(s).  But the ears strike me as grotesque distortions that distract from the roundedness of the head.

It's a particularly late Renaissance example--Classical story and some Classical naturalism but with all the drama and physical distortion of the Mannerist period.  This is the period known as the Dutch Golden Age--Amsterdam is an amazingly wealthy commercial center, a Calvinist but religiously tolerant community, coming to its own after the revolt against Spain.  I think something like this reflects this culture--Hendrick is primarily an architect but well known within the merchant oligarchy as a producer of cultured portraits; he's able to allude to the Classical past in a little moralizing tale without transgressing the Christian Protestant aesthetics (and the choice of Cupid as a child is clearly also part of this 17th c sensibility towards family, I think).